Every accent of English has its own diphthongs (and i as in the 'time' is a diphthong in every accent I have ever heard).
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JAMMay 23 '12 at 3:50

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@JAM Only phonetically; I think the phonemic diphthong set is pretty fixed.
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tchristMay 23 '12 at 4:14

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She’s not using a standard phonetician sense of diphthong. She’s using the kind of stuff they teach second-graders in America. A diphthong is a syllabic vowel with a glide either before or aft.
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tchristMay 23 '12 at 4:20

You could also analyse words like way, yay, wow, yow as triphthongs if you really wanted to, although we don’t tend to do so in English. Instead they tend to have an initial /w/ or /j/ followed by a diphthong in normal notation. (In Spanish though they’d be considered triphthongs, as in cambiáis, which has just two syllables, cam- and -biáis.)

Non-rhotic speakers claim to have others, but I have trouble thinking of those as diphthongs myself. I always analyse diphthongs as having a principal vowel to act as the syllabic nucleus and then a glide either before or after it. If the glide comes before the main vowel, as in /jə/, /juː/, it is a rising diphthong, and if the glide comes after the main vowel, as in /aɪ/, /eɪ/, /aʊ/, /oʊ/, /ɔɪ/, it is a falling diphthong. (Some people consider only the falling ones “real” diphthongs. I’m not sure why, since million has only two syllables for me, not three.)

I know of no diphthongs in English that have no glide in them, although whether you write your glides with /j/ and /w/ or as semivowels makes no great difference. This leads to alternate transcriptions, as in /eɪ/ for /ej/, and /aʊ/ for /aw/.

If there is no glide, I don’t count it as a diphthong. That means that I don’t read /ʊə/ as a single syllable. Rather, it has two syllables, as in the programming language named Lua/ˈlʊːə/. I guess I might write that /ˈlʊː.ə/ if I thought people might misunderstand me. And no, it is not homophonic with monosyllabic lure/ˈl(j)ʊːɹ/.

Non-rhotic speakers sometimes analyse words with words with ‹r› in them as diphthongs, where they substitute /ə/ for /ɹ/, but since that’s not a glide, it’s not going to make a new diphthong in my book; it might make a new syllable, though. Even though I say fire/faɪɹ/, I realize that they say /faɪ.ə/. For me that would then rhyme with the disyllabic maya/ˈmɑjɑ/, /ˈmaɪ.ə/, although it becomes challenging to assign the /j/ to one syllable or the other. I don’t see people writing fire/ˈfajəɹ/, but at least then it would seem like two syllables. But you end up reassigning the glide and changing the word from having an /aɪ/ diphthong in the first syllable to having a /jə/ syllable in the second.

For the record, here’s how I see the following r-bearing words:

bearer/ˈbe(ɪ)ɹəɹ/

tourer/ˈtʰʊɹəɹ/

nearer/ˈniːɹəɹ/

curer/ˈkʰjʊɹəɹ/

layer/ˈleɪ.əɹ/, /ˈle.jəɹ/

lair/leɪɹ/

fiery/ˈfaɪɹi/(two syllables), /ˈfa.jəɹi/(three syllables)

fairy/ˈfeɪɹi/

Faëry/ˈfe.jəɹi/(for trisyllabic rhymes in poetry)

more/mo(ʊ)ɹ/, /mɔɹ/

mower/ˈmoʊ.əɹ/, /ˈmowəɹ/

In that analysis, ‹r› is never part of a diphthong because /ɹ/ is not a glide, and if you write it as a schwa, you’ve likely introduced another second syllable. Non-rhotic AmE speakers (such as those from the South) always sound like they have have more syllables in their words to those of us from the North. The joke is there is no such thing as a one-syllable word in “Suthun”. For example, more is one syllable in the North’s /mo(ʊ)ɹ/, but two in the South’s /ˈmowə/.

Lastly, I realize that you can write ‹-er› as /ɚ/ or /ɹ̩/, as in murder written as either /ˈmərdər/ or /ˈmɝdɚ/. The problem is that we have only two rhotacized IPA symbols, stressed /ɝ/ and unstressed /ɚ/; for anything else that you want rhotacized, you have to use U+02DE MODIFIER LETTER RHOTIC HOOK, which doesn’t look so hot in most fonts, and doesn’t count as a combining character.

I believe the exact number varies by region. Certainly, speakers in my region pronounce "goat" and "soul" differently; so I know I have at least seven.
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user16269May 23 '12 at 6:30

and speaking of my region, The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary lists ten; and this doesn't include either of the two in union (which I pronounce /ju:njən/). Its list is day, my, boy, no, how, near, hair, tour, fire, sour.
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user16269May 23 '12 at 6:36

Out of interest, how would you analyse "bearer", "tourer" and "nearer" for your speech?
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Neil CoffeyMay 23 '12 at 8:25

@NeilCoffey I'm not sure whether you're asking me or tchrist. But I'm fairly sure I have a diphthong in "nearer", but not in "bearer" or "tourer". FWIW, I characterise my own accent as "Urban North Island New Zealand".
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user16269May 23 '12 at 8:50

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@Daniel δ I'm surprised you don't pronounce a diphthong in "same". Your profile says your from Pennsylvania. I would have guessed you might be from Scotland or Ireland. I have a friend from Lancaster and his pronunciation doesn't differ significantly from mine. I have to wonder if you're just not hearing the diphthong, as a lot of Americans have a hard time with perceiving diphthongs at all (including the person I describe in my question, actually, who didn't hear the letter "i" as a diphthong).
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Buttle ButkusMay 24 '12 at 22:55

Any comment from those who has voted negative ?
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speedyGonzalesMay 23 '12 at 12:37

Lots of problems with your set. /iə/ is no diphthong; it’s disyllabic, so Albania has four syllables, not three. Similarly /eə/ is also no diphthong but instead disyllabic: the first word in mea culpa has two syllables. And the goat, phone, no, soap set has /oʊ/ not /əʊ/. I suppose [əʊ] might be the realization in some speakers for now and others for know, but it’s surely not phonemic; otherwise those would be the same words.
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tchristMay 23 '12 at 15:08

In its current form, this question cannot be answered. The number of diphthongs varies from dialect to dialect.

For example, the word "four" in RP used to be pronounced as "foah", with a diphthong. Now the current RP form is "fo:" (long o). Or I say "sure" as "shuah", but there are many English speakers (in the UK) who say "sho:" (long o).

When a Southerner says four or sure, I hear two syllables, not a diphthong. Similarly, since Suthun some more is homophonic with Samoa, it necessarily has three syllables, not two with a diphthong. And I do not think the phonemic set varies the way the phonetic set does.
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tchristMay 23 '12 at 14:57

I don't know much about US dialects, so I can't agree or disagree with you there. On the other hand, i apologize for saying a truism but the number of phonemes does vary, depending on your dialect.
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Alex B.May 23 '12 at 15:09

I didn’t say all regional dialects had exactly the same set of phonemes. I said they didn’t vary the way the many phonetic realizations of those phonemes vary.
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tchristMay 23 '12 at 15:11

In that case I don't see how relevant it is to my answer.
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Alex B.May 23 '12 at 15:14

I cannot possible see how you think "foah" has a diphthong. Does "Boa" (as in boa constrictor) have two syllables or just one? Do you think "Samoa" has just two syllables or three? Yes, Suthun pronounces boy disyllablically as though it were spelt "boa", but that’s not what I’m talking about.
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tchristMay 23 '12 at 15:23

There are ten diphthongs in Hollywood (NA) English where two sounds (a vowel followed so closely by a consonant they in effect make one vowel sound). The English Phonetic Alphabet (EPA) notation describes this clearly:

I don’t know where you are getting those fake pronunciations: it isn’t even Kirschenbaum ASCII IPA. For example, eye does not have “a long i” in it, it has an /aɪ/ diphthong. Rather, beet has a long i in it. Etc. This is all wrong.
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tchristAug 25 '12 at 13:56

The poster seems to have created the English Phonetic Alphabet. It might be a fairly accurate representation of her Southern California accent; it certainly has a number of traits consistent with English spoken in that area.
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Peter Shor Aug 30 '12 at 3:05